The Dutch 'letter' IJ (2001)

[tmtvl]

Some thoughts from a Flem:

I was taught that the letter y is called "ypsilon" (pronounced "ipsilon") and met a fair few people who call it "ygrec". It seems like people here used to call it "Griekse ij" but that nomenclature fell out of favour.

The combinations "ei" and "ij" make the same sound, and we tend to call them respectively "korte (short) ei" and "lange (long) ij", though there is no difference in pronunciation between, for example, "leiden" (to lead) and "lijden" (to suffer).

I personally wouldn't consider "ij" to be a single letter any more than I would consider "ei", "eu", or "ui" to be a single letter. Though unlike the author I would prefer spacing out the letters individually as:

  r e i s t i j d

rather than:

  r ei s t ij d

even though I have noticed crossword puzzles tend to put "ij" (and only "ij") in a single square.

[throwaway_4638]

Actually there is a (nearly imperceptible) difference between the pronunciation of ei and ij, at least in my local region. For the "ij" sound the tongue is pushed into a slightly narrower bowl in the middle, while on the "ei" sound there is no tension on the tongue at all.

[arp242]

I think this is a bit of a generational thing, with older people considering ij a letter, and younger don't, "younger" being under 40/50 or so. I'm approaching 40 and I was never taught to see ij as a letter, and always considered it to be the same as eu, ou, ei, and so forth: two letters that make a single sound (digraph).

The y doesn't occur in Dutch words, only in loanwords, and while loanwords with a y are relatively common now, I suppose most are also fairly new (as in: last 100 years or so), which would explain the generational difference.

I also think it's fine to just capitalize the I: Ijsland instead of IJsland. I suspect this will be the norm 50 years from now.

[crote]

The funny part is that 'y' used to be quite common in Middle Dutch as a variant of 'ij' or 'i'. This resulted in words like 'anys' (now 'anijs'), 'Leyden' (now 'Leiden'), 'ghelyc' (now 'gelijk'), and 'waerheyt' (now 'waarheid'). It was simply an alternative spelling. This was officially abolished with a spelling reform in 1863, with it only being allowed in loan words.

> I also think it's fine to just capitalize the I: Ijsland instead of IJsland. I suspect this will be the norm 50 years from now.

Nope, this just looks wrong to me and the spelling rules do not allow it. It is written as a single letter, so it should be capitalized as a single letter.

[airza]

Dutch is not my first language but I play wordfeud in it sometimes; I was surprised to eventually infer that the Y was not used in any native words but still available in the bag. It's been a real challenge to use it to play the ~4 loan words I know that use it.

[wkat4242]

I think the ligature has just disappeared in favor of 'ij' because in Holland we use American keyboards. There used to be a special Dutch keyboard layout but simply using the American ones was cheaper. They lack the accents, the old florin sign and ligatures we have like the 'ij' and the paragraph sign. So we ended up using those less and less. Now I never write accents anymore in Dutch. And good riddance.

[Greenpants]

I recently distributed laptops to politicians and the first step in the setup process is choosing the keyboard layout. Nearly half of the people were already selecting "Dutch" before I could tell them we don't actually use that for the keyboard layout. We Dutch people are all using the US (international with dead keys) keyboard layout nowadays. There's no need for any special Dutch keys.

[OfSanguineFire]

In many languages the task of a typesetter is inserting ligatures for when the author’s manuscript had simply written two separate letters. I wonder if the same is true of modern Dutch publishing, even if ordinary people write i+j.

Afrikaans seems to have done fine with just giving up on this letter/sequence of letters entirely.

[ctenb]

I think this reflects a cultural phenomenon. Dutch people are very pragmatic when it comes to language. This is also seen in how easily loan words are introduced, especially from English these days, compared to say, French or German people.

[Pet_Ant]

I mean in English “th” ceally should be it’s own letter. It really has nothing to do with a “t” or an “h” and really should thought of as a single letter that just looks like two others. In many fonts, it really is because it’s a common ligature for aesthetic reasons.

[Muximize]

It used to be its own letter in Old English, and in Icelandic it still is: þ

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)

[sneed_chucker]

It used to be its own letter.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)

[throwaway_4638]

> It really has nothing to do with a “t” or an “h”

The placement of the tongue is exactly between those two letters. Makes perfect sense to me. No need for an extra letter just for that.

[klkvsk]

Curious, is this what inspired JetBrains to include such ligature in writing "IntelliJ", merging iJ? [1]

They embeded it in their own font in an interesting way: the ligature only works for whole "Intelli" + "J", not just any "i" + "j".

[1] https://www.jetbrains.com/ru-ru/idea/

[acadapter]

Hungarian has "dzs", a three-symbol letter, and lots of two-symbol letters, if you want a more extreme example.

[TacticalCoder]

Was this official on documents? For example did ID cards in the Netherlands (and Belgium) used to have "ij" shown as a ligature? And now they don't anymore?